The Spy Who Knew Too Much, page 3
He was about to leave the cabin when, for the first time, he realized that the ship-to-shore radio had been operating, emitting small, weak squawks the entire time. He chided himself for not hearing this before, and, searching for an excuse, he decided the noise had been drowned out by the intensity of his concentration.
Twisting the dial to the off position, he noticed the carefully arranged row of electronic consoles spread across a lower shelf. The ranger was no expert, but he felt these devices were something out of the ordinary, not your everyday ship-to-shore transmitting equipment. Why have this kind of sophisticated gear on a sailboat? Why, for that matter, was a collection of expensive electronics on a boat that apparently belonged to someone who delivered copies of the Washington Post for a living? He added one more question to the list of puzzlements that had been filling his mind since he’d boarded the Brillig.
Then he hightailed it to his jeep and drove across the dunes at breakneck speed to the nearest house to phone the Coast Guard.
CHIEF PETTY OFFICER JAMES MAXTON was a large, red-faced bull of a man with a furious temper. And this morning, as soon as the Brillig was towed to the tiny Coast Guard station he commanded at St. Inigoes, an appraising look at the fancy craft ignited his anger. Over his many years on the bay, he’d had his fill of hapless weekend sailors, and to his mind, despite Ranger Sword’s feverish conundrums, what had happened on the Brillig was not anything out of the ordinary. It was, he decided with a conviction reinforced by his mounting rage, just another case of some self-indulgent amateur with more money than brains or seafaring skills. Now he’d have to spend his day, as he’d done so many times before, tediously cleaning up this mess. Probably turn out that John Paisley was at this very moment drunk as a skunk in some seaside bar, not even realizing that his sleek boat had sailed off without him. He didn’t need to know John Paisley to know that he didn’t like him. Just thinking about him, and all the other feckless mariners like him he’d encountered over the years, sent his blood boiling.
But the chief knew the drill, and, to his credit, he followed it to the letter. He called the Maryland Natural Resources Police to report that a sailor had vanished from his boat. They dutifully passed the news on to an officer at the Maryland State Police who, as if he’d been roused from a deep sleep, dully replied that he’d list the incident as a possible drowning.
And there things might have remained for at least a few more indolent days if Chief Maxton hadn’t worked himself up into such a state. He wanted to give the careless Paisley a piece of his mind, but first he had to find him. So, following up on Ranger Sword’s initial discoveries, he began to make inquiries.
Apparently John Paisley worked as a newsagent at the Post, and he started there. A while passed before Joseph Haraburda, the circulation manager of the paper, got back to him. There was no John Paisley employed at the Post, he insisted. Not as a newsagent or in any capacity. In fact, he went on, flaring with high dudgeon, the identification number that the chief had shared belonged to someone else, a longtime employee named Archie Alston. And Alston, well, he’d never heard of Paisley and had no idea why this stranger would be claiming his ID number.
With that, Chief Maxton’s mood changed. His anger gave way to a fertile curiosity. A metal phonebook, one of those old-fashioned things, he recalled the ranger saying, and he went off to hunt it down.
All those telephone numbers with the 351 prefix were possible clues, he reasoned as he searched through the directory. He considered calling one, but instead, still tentative, he dialed the operator and asked what state had that area code. None, he was officiously informed. There was no such working prefix.
That threw him completely. Crazy notions started to run through his head. Who was this John Paisley? There was definitely something very odd about the entire incident. His suspicions were on high alert, but any reasonable explanation was beyond him.
Once again, he wanted to take the initiative, ring a number in the metal phonebook and see who answered. A lifetime in the Coast Guard, however, had drummed into him the necessity of protocol. There was a way things had to be done. He called headquarters in Portsmouth, Virginia, and, reining in his more outrageous theories, he shared what he knew with a Lieutenant Murray. His report was a model of objectivity, a recitation of the facts and nothing more.
Probably nothing to this, judged the lieutenant evenly. Just another boating accident. But stand by, the lieutenant instructed. I’ll run this up the chain of command and get back to you.
An hour, maybe even two, had passed before headquarters called back; time had seemed to lose its meaning for the chief that disconcerting day. It was Lieutenant Murray again, only now he’d abandoned the idea that this was simply another run-of-the-mill maritime mishap.
The 351 prefix is a government exchange, he explained cryptically. “Highly classified,” he added. But then, as if the secret was too juicy not to share, he blurted it out: “It belongs to the CIA.”
He ordered Chief Maxton to post an armed guard on the Brillig.
THE CIA WAS DILIGENT. TWO officious men from the agency’s Office of Security had, over several painstaking days, combed the Brillig from stem to stern. By the time they were done, they had boxed the reams of documents, the battered leather briefcase, the classified phone directory, and the sophisticated electronic equipment for transport to Langley. Whenever Coast Guard or state police officers dared to challenge their jurisdiction, the two CIA men offered a terse explanation that national security issues took precedence. Pressed for further details, the agency’s team refused to budge. “Need to know,” they barked, effectively slamming the door on further conversation.
John Paisley’s wife, Maryann, had also been informed; a resourceful Coast Guard officer had tracked down the address of her ranch home in McLean, Virginia. She had been separated from her husband since August, but, accompanied by her teenage son Edward, she immediately drove to John’s bachelor apartment in downtown Washington. She hoped to find something that would give her a clue as to what had happened on the Brillig.
When she opened the door to the apartment, she discovered that it had been turned inside out. Someone—or someones; a team perhaps, she guessed by the extent of the devastation—had wreaked havoc. It seemed to her that they’d been looking for something, something specific. It had probably been the work of the agency’s Office of Security, but when she inquired, she couldn’t get a straight answer. Still, she kept her temper in check.
It wasn’t simply that, after more than twenty years of marriage, she had tacitly acquired a practiced restraint. Maryann Paisley had worked at the agency, too. She held a classified clearance, was privy to many secrets, and knew from her own experience how business was conducted in the clandestine corridors of power. An obliging coconspirator, she didn’t complain about the breaking and entering. And she didn’t run to the press to share the news that her husband, the spy, was missing. She knew to keep her head down.
But then, a week later, a body was found.
THE DAY WAS GRAY AND gloomy, a warm drizzle falling. On Sunday, October 1, 1978, three fishermen aboard the Miss Channel Queen looked beyond their lines and, like a cautionary chorus in a Greek drama, suddenly shouted out in more or less unison: body ahoy!
Within an hour a Coast Guard cutter sped to the waters east of the mouth of the Patuxent River and lowered a wire basket to trap “the floater.” The corpse hauled on board was gruesome. Decomposition and the greedy nibbling of Chesapeake Bay crabs had rendered the body beyond recognition—a largely skinless, pasty specter of a human.
Yet even in the corpse’s macabre state, two abnormalities immediately caught the sailors’ attention. Above the left ear, a hole had been singed into the skull; brain matter continued to leak onto the deck. And, no less a cause for speculation, two sets of diver’s belts—later determined to be nineteen pounds each—were wrapped around the corpse like the tight bands encasing a sarcophagus.
Alerted by radio, the county coroner was waiting when the Coast Guard cutter arrived at the Naval Center on nearby Solomons Island. “Foul play,” Dr. George Weems summarily decided after a thirty-minute preliminary examination. Without articulating any further deductions, he sent the body off to the medical examiner in Baltimore.
The autopsy was performed the next day, and Dr. Stephen Adams recorded that the deceased was a five-foot-seven-inch, 144-pound white male. He then quickly determined that a single gunshot behind the left ear was the cause of death; it had fractured the skull as devastatingly as if a grenade had exploded inside the cranium. Establishing the identity of the deceased, however, proved more difficult. The corpse’s blood type could not be resolved since there was insufficient blood remaining in the body. Fingerprinting was also a challenge since the skin on the hands had decomposed. And a dental identification would be difficult, too, because only partial upper and lower plates remained intact after a week in the bay.
Perplexed, Dr. Adams made the grisly decision to sever the corpse’s hands. Packed in ice, the two bloated hands were shipped to the FBI laboratory; the hope was that its technicians might somehow be able to lift a print.
Yet that same day, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Russell Fisher, took it upon himself to ignore his subordinate’s lack of conclusive evidence. He did not hesitate to sign a report declaring that the deceased was John Arthur Paisley. The fact that the papers were dated October 1, 1978, and his office had not even received the corpse till the following day attracted no protests. Nor did Dr. Fisher’s assertion that the identification was possible thanks to the FBI’s fingerprint files, when, in fact, the two disembodied hands had not yet even arrived at the bureau’s laboratory. The official cause of death—suicide.
Several days later the body was picked up by a suburban Virginia funeral home that had a cozy relationship with the CIA. It remained stored as if forgotten in the basement for nearly a week until Maryann Paisley, who had somehow never gotten around to viewing the corpse, obligingly signed the order for its cremation. Later, though, she’d assert that she’d never signed anything.
With the remains reduced to ashes, it seemed likely that any further interest in the suicide on the Chesapeake Bay would go up in smoke, too, its unresolved mysteries floating off into the ether. The institutional process of forgetting could begin.
BUT THEN, AS FATE AND alcohol would have it, a reporter at a small Wilmington, Delaware, newspaper met up with a Coast Guard buddy for a few beers. In the course of what turned out to be a long boozy evening, the sailor shared a provocative story. The following day the reporter, ignoring his pounding hangover, began poking around. Ten days later he published a very thorough account of “the strange death of a spy.”
Once the front-page piece ran, it was the death blow to any hope of keeping the incident quiet. The national press jumped into the fray, and their suspicions, as well as their tenacity, were exacerbated because the CIA, despite its years of practice, remained such poor liars.
Responding to questions, a bemused CIA spokesman publicly dismissed John Paisley as a “low-level analyst.” As if lecturing particularly dense young children, he patiently explained that Paisley had retired several years ago, and when he left the agency he’d also, of course, left behind any access to top secret documents. The press, he sternly admonished, was looking for a story where none existed. Move on, he advised.
In swift order, reporters succeeded in shredding his official disclaimers. It was established that John Paisley, in the course of his distinguished twenty-year career, had in fact risen to the upper echelons of the agency, a trusted participant in many of its most consequential operations. And while Paisley had ostensibly retired two years ago, at the time of his death he nevertheless was still very much involved in hush-hush work at the highest levels. He continued to have operational access to the agency’s most closely guarded intelligence secrets—its sources and methods for knowing the latest Soviet nuclear developments.
Then, when the CIA’s unrepentant spokesman tried to peddle the story that the electronic equipment recovered from the Brillig was run-of-the-mill stuff, that, too, turned to sand. A relentless flurry of exposés revealed that the sloop was outfitted with a top secret burst transmitter, that the device worked on a preset frequency to transmit or receive tens of thousands of words per minute, and that the machine was largely used by spy agencies for covert communications with satellites. However, whether the transmitter was one of ours or one of theirs, or, equally incendiary, whether Paisley was communicating with our birds or the Russians, well, that remained the stuff of heated speculation.
With the smell of fresh meat in the air, the newshounds went on the hunt. How did Dr. Fisher, challenged one skeptical journalist, ascertain that the body he’d seen was Paisley’s? A close look would’ve been of no value; the body was unrecognizable, layers of skin eroded by the long emulsion in the bay. All the hair on the corpse’s head was gone; same, too, for any trace of Paisley’s telltale beard. And as for fingerprints, even if the severed hands proved, against all odds, printable, another problem had, incredibly, materialized: Both the FBI and the CIA claimed they had no sets of fingerprints for John Paisley in their files. And while the CIA spokesman conceded that it was standard practice to fingerprint all agency employees and store the records with the bureau, somehow, he explained as unashamedly as if he were a straight man delivering the punch line to an outrageous joke, Paisley’s prints had been “inadvertently destroyed.”
More disconcerting findings followed: Paisley’s Merchant Marine file listed him at five feet eleven inches and weighing 170 pounds. The autopsy reported that the corpse had apparently shrunk to five feet seven inches and 144 pounds. The remnants of the underwear on the recovered body had a clearly marked 32-inch waist. The BVDs filling a drawer in Paisley’s apartment were size 36. And Dr. Weems, the county coroner who was the first professional to gaze at the corpse pulled from the water, gave an explosive interview stating that the neck “looked like it had been irritated, like a kind of squeeze, or there had been a rope around the neck. You get that type of lesion on your neck from hanging.” He told reporters that he’d stake his reputation as a coroner, and he’d been in the post for twenty years, that the circle around the body’s neck was made before the individual had been killed. Forget the Baltimore medical examiner’s suicide verdict, he went on angrily. This was a case of murder. And when diligent journalists gave the autopsy report another perusal, they found that it had dealt with the provocative implications of the neck abrasions by simply not bothering to mention their existence.
In fact, when scrutinized with renewed attention, the official verdict of suicide seemed to fall apart. The gunshot wound was above the left ear. Would Paisley, who was right-handed, have chosen to reach awkwardly across his body to deliver the fatal shot? And then why the thirty-eight pounds of diving weights? Was that Paisley’s attempt to cause his body to sink without a trace so that his suicide would not be revealed? But if so, why? He had two insurance policies, and they both would pay out regardless of the cause of death. And what about the fact that there was no blood, brain tissue, or, for that dumbfounding matter, a gun or simply an expended cartridge aboard the Brillig?
The Maryland state police cleverly swept away those annoying details. Paisley, according to the scenario they shared, had crisscrossed his body with the thirty-eight pounds of lead weights, then trundled to the side of the boat and, with one colossal effort, leaped overboard—yet deftly managed to reach across his chest and, while in midair, shoot himself above the left ear. It would have been, some wags suggested, an acrobatic maneuver nearly as nimble as the police investigators’ explanation.
FOLLOWING THE UNFOLDING EVENTS FROM afar, exiled to Brussels, retired, privy to no agency files, relying on what he read in the papers and his faint memories of the John Paisley with whom he’d once worked, Pete could only wonder if it would ever be possible to get definitive answers. Was that Paisley’s body that had been hauled from the bay? Had he taken his own life? The reality, he decided, was that it would be impossible for him, for any outsider, to make sense of the sort of demons that would drive someone to blow his own brains out. There were things he would never know, Pete thought.
Yet at the same unsettling time Pete grew to feel with an increasing sense of urgency that there were things he needed to know. He thought of Trigon, and the completely unsatisfactory stories offered to explain his unmasking. What had really happened in Moscow? He also found himself wondering, If that wasn’t Paisley’s body, then whose was it? And why an impostor? Why fake a death? Why, for that matter, christen a boat with a bit of gibberish from Lewis Carroll? Was it, he wondered, some sort of clue? Would only a vorpal blade be able to cut through the thicket of suspicions and half-truths? And he wondered: Was the mystery of Paisley’s grotesque death another piece in the long-running puzzle he had been trying to piece together for years? Or was he once again, as his detractors had sneered, crudely shoving square pegs into round holes?
He thought of their vituperative attacks. Sick think. Paranoid. Obsessed. The Monster Plot. They had hurled those accusations at him, and, he knew, the imprecations had found their mark. He had been branded. In the end, more angry than beaten, he’d run off, slamming the door firmly behind him.
That should be that, he thought. But he also knew their facile psychologizing had not come close to what had been driving him on back then. Or now. He was his father’s son, and the irreducible core of his proud inheritance was an unwavering commitment to his duty. He knew now, as he had always known, that things had gone very wrong at the agency. It was a knowledge that was both cruel and dangerous. And it would not let him rest.
Chapter 3
AND YET PETE HESITATED. BRUSSELS had been in his time a good place to be a spy, and now Pete, nearly eight years after walking away from the agency yet still a sprightly fifty-four, was finding it an even better place to put the past behind him and reenter the overt world.
